Bristol Park Medical Buys New Headquarters : Real estate: Provider of care to health maintenance organizations will move into Irvine complex formerly occupied by Western Digital Corp. Purchase price was $6.5 million.
Bristol Park Medical Group Inc. said Tuesday that it has bought the 109,000-square-foot former corporate headquarters of Western Digital Corp. in Irvine for $6.5 million.
The medical service company, which provides primary care to health maintenance organizations, plans to consolidate several of its Costa Mesa corporate sites into the Irvine location for its own headquarters by October. About 150 of the company’s 700 employees will work there.
“We’ve been growing very rapidly, and we have been looking for a larger facility,” said Stephen Newman, the company’s corporate general counsel. “This is a location that is centrally located.”
The complex, at 2445 McCabe Way near the interchange of the San Diego Freeway and Jamboree Road, housed Western Digital until 1990, when the computer component maker moved to a larger building in the Irvine Spectrum. The site has been vacant ever since.
Grubb & Ellis Co. brokers, who represented the owners, the Aris & Carolyn Anagnos Trust, formed for a Los Angeles real estate developer, said the deal was one of the largest purchases a company has made to buy its own offices in Orange County in recent years. In most cases, companies sign long-term leases, leaving ownership to investment groups or partnerships that include the original developer.
“Rates are down now, and people are seeing a great opportunity,” said John R. Rothwell, senior marketing consultant at Grubb & Ellis in Newport Beach. “There’s no new construction, but activity is really starting to boom. People are really saying, ‘Hey, there’s a window of opportunity here.’ They want to get in on the curve.”
Another complex, the 102,900-square-foot site of Taco Bell Corp.’s former headquarters at 16808 Armstrong Ave. in Irvine, has been on the market for five years, and Grubb & Ellis recently received four offers for the site.
Rothwell, along with Senior Vice Presidents Ron Showalter and George Economos, negotiated the sale to Bristol Park. But negotiations dragged for more than a year as a refinancing arrangement was worked out with the trust’s lender, Aetna Life & Casualty Insurance Co., which held a deed with a $7.8-million balance.
“We started off wanting to lease, but in the end financing was difficult,” Newman said. “What it comes down to is we didn’t want to spend $1 million in improvements on someone else’s building.”
Bristol Park, a privately held company, is expected to post about $60 million in sales this year, up about 10% from 1992, Newman said. The company, with 700 employees, has seven clinics in Orange County and plans to open two more within the next year.
